The present invention is to provide the art with an electromechanical system for preventing the overlap of documents fed from a stack.
A variety of automated machines such as document sorters, mail sorters, copiers, page feeders, punch card readers, automatic teller machines and fax machines utilize document feeders to move documents within a machine. Documents in a machine are often stacked and automatically fed from the stack. In the process of successively feeding documents from the stack, the documents may undesirably overlap. The overlap of documents may cause a misfeed or jam in a machine and interrupt the successful processing of documents.
An object of the present invention is to provide a document feeder with protection against overlap of documents during processing in automated machines. More particularly, the present invention is directed to an independently driven nudger for controlling document movement.
In accordance with the teachings of the present invention a document feeder with overlap protection is disclosed. A nudger is positioned to rest on a first document of a document stack located in a hopper. The nudger maintains a proper space between a first document and a next document. An edge detector located at the nudger indicates whether the nudger should be rotating. A feed wheel accelerates the first document and a separator retains the next document in the hopper.